Weekly Brief: Are you Paranoid about Androids?

Are you completely operational and are all your circuits functioning normally? Good!

2001, A Space Odyssey references aside, it really has been a banner week for robotics news. Post-bank holiday, we (and seemingly everyone else on startup social media) watched in awe as a £700k robot tentatively picked a raspberry. This may seem a relatively benign field to throw groundbreaking robotics research at but, in a post-Brexit UK, farming and labour costs could potentially rise quite aggressively. So this is Fieldwork Robotics’ solution, boasting a 150% increase in yield when compared to human harvesters.

Meanwhile Ford is upping the ante in the delivery space with its new bipedal, startlingly humanoid robot named Digit. This guy can climb stairs, lift packages and (hopefully) do a generally better job than simply lose your countless ASOS parcels in a depot somewhere. It’s worth noting that this is a ‘research project’ with no established plans for roll-out, but having watched the video we wouldn’t be surprised if this changed in the near(ish) future.

And there’s another area where robotics could potentially change the game, or rather, change your game. The Metro published an opinion piece on whether romantic or sexual relationships with bots (!) are likely to become widespread given how many individuals find love online. Now, it is a bit of a leap of faith to assume the occasional hungover right-swipe will lead to a future a la ex-Machina. But it does open up an interesting discussion about how we combat the loneliness that can come from increasingly living life on the web…

Whether or not the encroachment of our shiny metal friends is good or bad for the human race generally, we know we want to be at the party! Check out Work in Startups for a whole host of robotics, machine-learning and AI jobs. Whatever your taste in future tech we have you covered!

Weekly Brief: You shop, they… might drop?

If the growing mountain of ASOS deliveries and returns in our office is anything to go by, the popularity of online shopping is on a constant rise. Though it would seem that the fantastically convenient world of online shopping and delivery is not quite sitting on a bed of roses.

Resolver, a platform to air and (shock!) resolve customer grievances with companies has announced an 84% increase YOY in UK consumer complaints referencing online shopping. Some of the more recurrent problems included (perhaps unsurprisingly) customer service, issues with deliveries, quality control and refunds. So… basically everything that a high street experience could resolve? Meanwhile in their storming expansion through the subcontinent, African delivery giant Jumia have reported similar issues… and some more interesting ones. In a fascinating piece by the FT they explore some region-specific troubles such as distrust of corrupt suppliers, resulting in a pay-on-delivery culture and an (even more) hazardous life for the underlying couriers. Maybe this is something the giants of Alibaba and Facebook can solve as they weigh into the fray – the former is helping pioneer facial recognition tech to the way we buy, while the latter is supposedly about to introduce online marketplace functionality across all three of its major platforms, suggesting that they hope to marry influencer power and personal recommendations from your inner circle (and then take your cash). Time will tell if innovation, technical development and design from the big dogs will unseat the likes of Amazon – who knows if buying a package on Whatsapp will solve any of these issues?